MERCEDES-BENZ//G-CLASS BORN IN THE DESERT

AI Film · Concept, Direction & Production

A viper, a sandstorm and a machine born from the dust. Born in the Desert is a 35-second spec film for the electric G 580, made end to end with generative AI and directed like a live-action shoot: script, storyboard, camera blocking, lookdev, edit, colour and sound.

Role: Concept - direction - AI production - edit - colour
Pipeline: Blender - Midjourney - Krea (Nano Banana Pro, Seedance 2.5) - Seedream - LoRA - Premiere Pro 

Styleframes

How it was made

From a blank page to the final mix, step by step. Every stage below fed the next one: the script defined the shots, the storyboard and the Blender blocking defined the cameras, and the styleframes became the first frames the video model animated.

01

Script

Seven acts, from the omen to the signature. A desert viper senses the storm, the sandstorm swallows the desert, and the G-Class is born from the dust before driving into the horizon. Each act was written with its camera, duration and sound already in mind.

02

Storyboard

Every act sketched as a production panel, with camera language (aerial, ground level, push-in, orbit, pull-back), screen direction and palette. Left to right is the journey: the storm, the birth, the escape.

03

Camera blocking in Blender

Before generating a single frame, the key camera moves were blocked out in Blender with a clay G-Class and a low-poly viper: the push-in to the grille, the interior pass and the top-down G-Turn. These renders became the motion reference for the AI shots.

04

Lookdev

Styleframes were built in Midjourney and refined with Nano Banana Pro: the hero three-quarter shot got a readable deep teal-blue paint, a warm amber rim light, a crisp grille, star and LED rings, while the grain and the backlit dust stayed untouched.

05

Product accuracy

A LoRA trained on 13 studio views of the G 580 keeps the car true to the real product from every angle, so the proportions, grille and spare wheel survive the stylisation.

06

Motion

Each act was animated in Seedance 2.5 with multi-shot prompts, using the approved styleframes as first frames and four versions per generation. 68 clips came out of the process, and the best shots were often combined from different versions.

07

Edit

The 68 clips were logged against the script, shot by shot, and cut down to a 30-second structure with a deliberate black pause before the birth and a signature at the end.

08

Colour

Finished in Premiere Pro balancing LUT for the cabin and a mono film grain, so every clip reads as one film.